Lawrence’s genius and masterful will, too, determined the whole strategy to be employed for the suppression of the Mutiny. He settled the question that Delhi must be instantly besieged. He formed a military base for the siege at Umballa, a distance of a hundred miles, and he kept sleepless guard over that long line of communications. He fed the besieging force with supplies and munitions of every kind; reinforced it with, first, his own frontier troops, the famous Guides and the Ghoorkas, and, later, with his own movable column. He cast into the scale against Delhi, in effect, his last coin, his last cartridge, and his last man. And in that terrible game, on which hung the fate of the British rule in India, Lawrence won! “Through him,” wrote Lord Canning, “Delhi fell.” And the fall of Delhi rang the knell of the Mutiny. [Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HERBERT B. EDWARDES, K.C.B., K.C.S.I. _From a lithograph_] Once, it is true, even John Lawrence’s iron courage seemed to give way, or, rather, the strain of the peril threw his cool judgment off its balance. The fate of India visibly hung on Delhi. The force on the Ridge was absurdly inadequate for its task, and Lawrence conceived the idea that, to succeed at Delhi, it would be necessary to abandon Peshawur, give up the Punjaub to Dost Mohammed, and retire across the Indus. There were three European regiments, with powerful artillery, and the best native troops locked up beyond the Indus. On the Ridge at Delhi they would decide the issue of the siege. “If Delhi does not fall,” Lawrence argued, “Peshawur must go. Let us abandon the Punjaub for the sake of Delhi.” It is still thrilling to read the sentences in which Herbert Edwardes protested against this evil policy. To abandon Peshawur, he urged, would be to fail not only at Delhi, but all over India. “Cabul would come again!” Lawrence quoted Napoleon against Edwardes. Did not Napoleon ruin himself in 1814 by holding fast to the line of the Elbe instead of falling back to the Rhine? But Edwardes knew the Eastern mind. India is not Europe. To waver, to seem to withdraw, to consent to disaster, was to be ruined. To abandon the Punjaub, Edwardes warned Lawrence, was to abandon the cause of England in the East. “Every hand in India would be against us. Don’t yield an inch of frontier!... If General Reed, with all the men you have sent him, cannot get into Delhi, let Delhi go. The Empire’s reconquest hangs on the Punjaub.” Then he quotes Nelson against Lawrence. “Make a stand! ‘Anchor, Hardy, anchor!’” The quotation was, perhaps, not very relevant; but it is curious to note how one brave spirit seems to speak to another across half a century, and give a new edge to its courage.